Blogging Pubbitch

Bangkok is fine, but what Holly and I really wanted to do was to learn to dive. After a couple of days sight-seeing we had cold feet, so purchased the bus and boat tickets that would take us to Koh Tao, the diving capital of Thailand. In all our travels, people had raved about how good the diving around the island was, and how cheap the courses were, so that newbies such as us could get to grips with things without too much hassle or expense.

This explains why we found ourselves on enormously choppy seas, sheltering behind a pitifully ineffective screen as our speed boat, filled to the gunwales with tourists, bounced, leapt, rocked and rolled towards the island at some unearthly hour of the morning (lets not even mention the hour and a half spent listening to the Carpenters before the boat jetty opened) We had been speaking with James, one of the tour reps who was on the boat with us. He suggested that we take a look at Nangyan Island because the rooms were meant to be lovely, the rates not too bad and because we smiled so much we could get a couple of free fun dives after we'd completed our Open Water PADI course. Working out how much we had expected to spend on Koh Tao, it seemed like a good idea.

There was another reason why getting off at Koh Nangyuan was a good idea, and it has a lot to do with the fact that we were stopping there first. You see, some of the other tourists were from SE Asia, and for whatever reason they were appalling travellers. So appalling that the captain ran out of leak proof, translucent plastic bags that they could use to keep their breakfasts in once they'd choked them back out. Frankly, sitting on a boat for an hour while miserably wet, surrounded by the gentle stench of vomit, the soft, wet splashing noise of the same matter sloshing into and around bags and a 180 degree field of view filled with the wretchedly hurling, is not my idea of fun. So we got off the boat ASAP.

The island itself was amazing. It consists of three lumps of rock, joined by two arms of sandy beach. The beaches shift and change with the seasons, and at high tide one of them disappears under the waves --- you can either wade to over where it should be, or hop on to a dinghy attached to a stout rope and haul yourself over, should you need to. Obviously, we did, because we were staying in a little hut on one of the lumps of rock. The hut was one of several that had been built so as not to disrupt the surrounding forest too much, so firstly the view from our hut was stunning, and secondly the view from everywhere else wasn't marred with concrete. We loved it.